


Ethereal Reverie

by panaceaa



Category: South Park
Genre: Flowery language with a side of fluff, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-05-05
Packaged: 2019-05-02 15:57:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14548236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panaceaa/pseuds/panaceaa
Summary: Your name is Kyle Broflovski and for as long as you can remember, you’ve been searching for something.





	Ethereal Reverie

Your name is Kyle Broflovski and for as long as you can remember, you’ve been searching for something.

Maybe it’s for a path to a future where your name can be found inside of one of your textbooks. _Kyle Broflovski_ written in permanent ink and immortalized within its pages, remembered for all of time.

Or maybe you’re just looking for meaning. Deeper understanding. A reason why you could possibly exist if it wasn’t to do great things. An answer to what you’re supposed to be doing, and where your destiny is leading you.

All you know is that you’re searching for something, but you’re not quite sure what that is.

***

You fall in love exactly two times in your life.

The first time you fall in love it’s not with a person, as the phrase may suggest, but with a feeling.

It’s the feel of your stubby nails digging into the palms of your hands and of your voice rising above the rest to be heard by everyone around you. You fall in love with the indisputable high that assails you when you can feel the gaze of tens or twenties of people, all looking at you. Listening. Watching. Wondering. You are the focal point, the star, the legend of the now, and the feeling soaks into your soul and makes you feel alive.

You fall in love with the feeling, although you know it never stays.

For every time you return home, sit in your empty room with no one but your walls and inner demons to watch you, you feel the emptiness take over. The inner wonderings, the quiet thought that none of it matters. That they’ve forgotten you, and this- the silence of your room, the chill of your empty bed, the fading indentations on your palms…

That this is all there is.

***

The second time you fall in love it’s not so much a moment in time as it is a realization. A recognition of the presence of the pulse of your heart that has been getting stronger every time you’re around one of your closest friends.

He is something of a mystery at times, but he is bright and excitable and in the moments that you make him smile your heart picks up its pace and you feel like the most important person in all of the world. He is quiet. You know that people often seem to forget that he’s even in the room until his muffled voice speaks up with some crude remark or another. But you know differently. You’ve become attuned to him, intrinsically aware of where he is in a room at all times. Like a streak of sunlight through a darkened room, you don’t know how anyone could not notice him.

There is no sudden moment that it happens, no big scene that explains exactly where the divide exists. But slowly as you grow older, you start spending more time with him. Afternoons spent under the warmth of the sun with him sitting beside you, blue eyes glimmering from beneath the shadow of his hood. The pieces of the puzzle get lost in the flow of time, but eventually he stops wearing his hood and eventually you stop picking fights. The two of you might never talk about it but if you end up sitting a little closer to each other, even when under the weight of Stan’s or your other friend’s knowing looks, then so be it.

And yes, sometimes you do still think that the universe is just too big. An ever-expanding construct that you’ve for some unknown reason been thrown into. Where you’re forever lost and far too small to ever make a difference, even with as much as you may fight to. Sometimes when you’re all alone you still think that maybe nothing really matters, that nothing has ever really mattered, and you’ve just been lying to yourself this entire time.

But next to Kenny you kind of feel like you’ve discovered your own little pocket of the universe, known between only the two of you. A framework of space and time that’s filled with clandestine smiles and whispered words that no one else will ever know. That no one else besides the two of you will ever be able to understand.

And you find yourself feeling just a little less lost.

***

The first time it happens it is without preamble or concrete reason.

There is the earth and there is the night sky and the two of you have found yourselves somewhere in-between.

“I’ve never really liked the stars,” you admit to him, staring up at the sky in frustration. They are words that slide off the tip of your tongue in truth, even despite the fact that you’re still stuck looking up at them and that you’re the one that kept dragging Kenny out here, under the damned things, in the first place.

You feel his fingertips against the curve of your jaw, and you allow him to turn your head towards him and away from the starlit blanket surrounding the world. Then without removing his hand, he leans in and kisses you.

It is a gentle press of lips against your own. Something that you quickly deepen before he can pull away. It’s better than you had ever imagined. The feel of his hair brushing across your cheek, the warmth of his skin beneath your fingertips, his breath and the shape of his smile forming against your lips.

The flow of time comes to a stop and leaves the two of you alone with nothing but the feel of the other.

And you discover a new thing to get lost in.

***

There is a small little bookshop a few paces off Main Street.

It’s a quiet, quaint little place that you start working at when you’re eighteen years old. Not many people come in and so you’re left alone most of the time, left to wander the store with nothing but your thoughts for company. You glide your hand across the book spines as you walk by, glancing at the names of authors who have become great and legends that have only become greater through the passage of time.

Sometimes when Kenny comes to visit you at work you lead him through the store and press him up against those very shelves as you kiss him senseless. Occasionally your fingertips come away dust covered from one of the shelves or books left forgotten there and the particles end up getting caught on the contours of his face or in the strands of his hair. And when you pull back and look at him, dust-stained and beaming, you think that he might actually be the greatest legend of them all.

You’re lucky to have gotten the chance to have known him.

***

Your name is Kyle Broflovski and over time you’ve learned that the fundamental rule of living is that there will always be questions that you won’t know the answer to.

It’s probable that you’ll never know exactly who you are. The universe still feels a little too big to you, and maybe you still don’t know what it means to be somebody within its ever-expanding horizon.

But there is a boy who sits under it with you.

A boy with shining eyes and a secret smile that he reserves only for you. With his hands that fit perfectly within yours and his lips that slide into a playful smirk before pressing against your own with a feeling of overwhelming rightness that causes you to shiver and pull him even closer.

Because the one thing you did learn is that with Kenny you know exactly where you belong.

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been writing a lot of dialogue lately which definitely isn't my strong suit, so I wanted to go back to my roots for a bit :P I have a weakness for second person so of course this is entirely self-indulgent and I'm sorry.
> 
> PaisleyWraith drew fanart for this because she's a treasure to this world:  
> https://panacea-for-all-evil.tumblr.com/post/177901065346/paisleywraith-panacea-for-all-evils-ethereal


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